


Wargame

by Tayine



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Friendly competition, Gen, One Big Happy Family, One Shot, Paintball, Target Practice, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:20:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28446792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tayine/pseuds/Tayine
Summary: Andy takes the rest of the team into a deep, dark forest for reasons unknown.Inspired by a great Tumblr post wondering whether the team ever took time to train and/or play and/or try desperately to win a very important game.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 163





	Wargame

The SUV bounced on a deep rut on the forest road, jerking Nile against the door, and she lifted her head from the screen of her iPod. She’d been listening to a true crime podcast, zoned out from the long drive, and she was surprised to see that the forest cover around them had gotten thicker. Andy had piled them in at the crack of dawn, handing out granola bars like they were battlefield rations, swatting Joe’s hand away from the rear door when he went to stow his backpack. Nile had snuck a glance back there during the drive, when she was almost sure Andy’s eyes weren’t on the rearview mirror to catch her, and she’d seen the piles of black tactical duffel bags. Her curiosity itched, but Andy wouldn’t give away anything she didn’t want to, so the ride had been quiet and calm, German pop radio piping in from the 90s-era stereo system.

They’d been on the road for nearly two hours, first on one of the major thoroughfares leaving Stuttgart, then later on smaller surface roads. Now it seemed they had transitioned to forest paths made of dirt and gravel with years of damage from rain and snow.

“Where are we going?” she asked, braving the first question in hours. There was a general rousing in the car, as if the drive had lulled them all to a peaceful semi-consciousness. Beside her, Joe was dozing with his head on Nicky’s shoulder, but he stirred at the sound of her voice. Booker, in the front seat, turned his head towards Andy, asking the same question wordlessly.

“You’ll see,” Andy said, a sort of playful mischievousness that Nile hadn’t been expecting warming the tone of her voice. Andy had been many things over the weeks of their acquaintance, but the first true curveball was her ability to be tricksy.

It took another ten minutes or so, at the end of which Joe stretched luxuriously beside her and deliberately-not-deliberately crushed her into the side of the door with his long-limbed advance into her space, but soon Andy pulled the car into a small clearing paved in dirt. Nile shoved at Joe, which he dodged with a roguish laugh, catching her wrist before it could devolve into a full-on scuffle, and the engine rumbled into silence as Andy threw the SUV into park.

They disembarked, pulling at sore muscles. Nile had spent a significant portion of her adult life cramped into small spaces with many wide-shouldered adults, but it never got any more comfortable. She rolled her neck and then looked around the clearing. The coniferous trees were thick and dark and looming, but they swayed pleasantly in a gentle breeze. The sky was lightly white, a gentle, distant overcast cap to the clouds, but the air wasn’t too cold.

At first she’d thought Andy had found them a natural clearing, a place just off the dirt road that was wide enough to park, but then she saw stones set deliberately in a row along the head of the dirt lot, marking off multiple parking spaces. This was maintained, then, a parking lot for cars that people knew. She looked around, curious, wondering why in the world Andy had brought them.

Their leader went to the back of the SUV and lifted the rear door, waiting for them to crowd around beside her. She unzipped one of the black duffle bags. Nile, behind the others, craned her neck to see around Booker’s shoulder.

“You can’t be serious, boss,” Booker said.

The bag was full of weapons. Nile pushed forward to see better, wondering wildly if there was a mission out here in the wilderness that Andy had not briefed them on. Then she saw the shapes of them, the bulbous protrusion on top like a goiter, the long, narrow barrel. She began to laugh.

Andy pulled one of the guns from its bag, shoving it into Booker’s chest, before he could protest again. “I’m deadly serious,” she said. She raised her eyebrows just a bit at him, and he took on its weight in his arms reluctantly.

“What are we doing, Andy?” Nile asked, picking up a weapon of her own and checking it with the practice of a soldier, though the mechanics were elementary and most of the parts were made of plastic.

“We’re going to play a little game.”

Nicky and Joe had also chosen their own guns and were checking them over. Andy went into the rest of the bags and began dolling out more supplies: dark goggles with clear plastic lenses; zippered sacks stuffed with extra ammo; CO2 canisters in velcro belt pouches. Nile strapped on her gear, a silly grin on her face. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been involved in a game, the last time she had taken time out of her day to just _play_. Andy was a goddamn genius.

“There will be five minutes to take position,” Andy said, lowering her goggles so that her blue eyes glinted in the milky light. “I’ll whistle to begin play. Then you have to hunt or be hunted.”

“Rules?” Joe asked, his gun angled on his hip with casual readiness.

“No teams,” she said. “No other weapons. The person with the most number of hits on the other players wins.”

“How long do we go?” Nicky asked.

“Until I stop us. Everyone ready?”

Nile’s ammo balls were lime green, and she squeezed one between her thumb and pointer finger, delighting in the soft yet resistant firmness to it. She’d never shot a paintball gun before. She dropped the final ball into the reservoir, snapping it shut, and grinned hugely at their leader.

“Go.”

Nile took off, deep in the sport of the game, not caring if the others laughed behind her or not. She loved games, had a fierce competitive streak – her little brother had yelled at her about it more than once – and she would rather die than back down from a challenge like this. Not to mention that it was a great opportunity to judge the character of the team, especially on a pseudo strike mission like this. She had more than proven her ability with firearms and tactical movement during the rescue from Merrick, and she still got chills when she thought of how easily they had worked as a team during those few minutes clearing rooms and shooting down the enemies who came at them. But this would be the first time she would play a sort of wargame against them, their centuries of practice going up against what boiled down to her instincts. She was determined to hold her own, at least for a little while. She didn’t expect to win, but she would get close.

But when she braved a brief glance over her shoulder, merely to judge how far she had gone into the forest cover, she saw her family members streaking through in similar lines of hunkered-down speed and strategy. Nile felt a thrill, a spark of adrenaline and excitement in her belly. She ran on her toes for several more moments, rushing through the coniferous underbrush of the forest. This was a maintained playing field, the tree trunks pocked with old paint splatters. She was even amused to see a few wooden barriers and structures, offering cover and hiding places for the more discerning player. Andy had probably rented the field out for the day, to ensure they wouldn’t be disturbed.

When the whistle sounded, long and sharp in the air, Nile had to suppress the newest giggle in her throat. Andy’s whistle was like a wolf howl echoing through the trees, and she made a mental note to ask for a lesson how to do it. She could barely whistle a single note to herself.

Then the forest was quiet.

Nile was hunched at the base of a tree, sitting behind a sharply-tufted bush, her gun at her shoulder. There was no sight to aim along, and she doubted the aim would be true to one anyway. She would just have to shoot and pray.

There was a rapid exhalation of shots, retorts like badly-suppressed machine gun fire. Nile swept the barrel of her gun along the horizonline, low to the ground and watching for movement. None of them had worn anything like MARPAT, the USMC’s camouflage pattern that hid its wearers in forest and desert conditions, and poor Booker had been wearing a cream-colored shirt that would shine as surely as a spotlight in the dun foliage. She waited, hearing the forest rustle and sigh back at her.

 _There_. Movement under some brush, a figure loping about twenty meters from her. Nile brought the gun up, tracking the path the enemy combatant would take. She aimed just ahead of where they were going, cooled herself with a breath, and fired.

The gun popped rapidly with more automatic fire, a child’s plaything compared to the power and recoil of an actual M27. She saw the figure twist with the impact before dropping prone to the forest floor to avoid any further paintballs, and Nile smiled grimly at her victory. The first point scored in the game, as far as she knew.

She couldn’t stay, though. Her target was firing off balls in her general direction from their sniper’s position. Nile felt more than heard the splattering impact of the paintballs against the tree trunk beside her, and she flinched away when a tiny drop of lemon yellow paint flicked onto her cheek from the nearest globule strike. She wiped at it, hoping that wouldn’t be considered cheating, and tucked-and-ran, finding another scratchy tuft of brush to use as cover. The retorts of the gun followed behind her back, and she shrieked with uncontained laughter as paint exploded on her heels.

“I see you!” echoed Joe’s voice, responding to her delight. “You can’t hide from me!”

“Catch me if you can, old man!” she taunted back, knowing she would pay for it sooner rather than later.

More gunfire exploded on her left, and Nile cried out when a sharp pain flared on her inner thigh. A royal blue mark spotted on the seam of her jeans. She too dropped as heavily to the ground as a tipping statue, rolling onto her back to heel-shimmy up against the opposite side of a lone chunk of boarded fence. There were slits in between the slats of wood to use as a viewfinder, and she kept still behind them. She didn’t know the colors of the others’ paint, except for the yellow of Joe, now, so she had no idea who it was who had used her vocal exchange as free points in their game.

“Rookies making rookie mistakes!” came Andy’s voice, musical with laughter and accomplishment.

In response, Nile aimed her gun over the fence and blind-fired. She heard the autumnal crunch of leaves and forest floor as Andy fled, and Nile got no feedback as to whether she had landed any of her shots at all. She brought her gun back close to her chest and cradled it against her bent legs, reloading hurriedly. She was sitting open on this other side, facing only the shadowed, rolling terrain of more forest, so she had to find better cover fast.

She heard more pops and listened intently. There was a loud shuffling of leaves and underbrush, and she heard a cried, “Aw, fuck!” as someone obviously made a near-fatal error.

Joe brayed with more triumphant laughter and shot off his weapon, and Nile took the distraction as the opportunity to relocate. She dove forward beneath a very heavily-leafed bush and crawled on her elbows and forearms, her gun tucked protectively against her chest.

Something struck the side of her head, and she cried out before she could stifle it. She reached up and her fingertips came away bright pink; Booker or Nicky, then, had spotted her in her hiding place.

“Ouch!” she shouted accusingly, knowing she wouldn’t receive the sympathy she was pretending to want.

When no taunt came back, she knew it had been Nicky. He was sniping somewhere, the patient bastard.

She came out the other side of the bush and took off full-tilt. Twenty steps from the bush, she felt another ricochet against her hip, from the same direction as the first one, and she lifted a middle finger on a fully-extended arm without turning her head as she continued to run.

There was a gutted shack standing incongruously behind a thicker copse of trees, and Nile beelined for it. She turned through the rectangle of the doorway and caught her breath, listening with all her heart. The heads of the trees sighed and swayed, and somewhere off a bird twittered, as if it was enjoying the spectacle.

She stood with her back pressed up against the wall that led up to the half-built roof, waiting. There was a footstep. Nile brought the barrel of the paintball gun up, her trigger finger squeezing as she aimed, sighted, focused.

“Fuck!” Booker wheezed, reeling backwards, a tight spacing of lime green lighting up in the dead center of his chest.

Nile laughed so hard she almost lost her footing on the dusty floor, sweeping the gun away from him again out of long-beaten-in muzzle discipline. “Nice sneaking,” she grinned. “Well, go ahead.” She spread her arms slightly.

Booker shook his head, his gun held against him, the barrel pointing up. “I don’t deserve it.”

“Oh, come on. You found me here.”

He shook his head again, smiling slightly. “I’ll give you thirty seconds to run.”

She rolled her eyes but obliged him. “I don’t need you to go easy on me,” she said over her shoulder as she returned to the doorless doorway.

“Oh, I know it. Twenty-nine.”

She ran.

It felt like ages before a second whistle shrieked through the trees, bringing a final halt to the festivities. Nile got up from her belly and dusted off the leaves clinging to her shirt.

“Back to the car!” Andy’s voice echoed.

Nile saw Nicky drop, long-limbed, from the low tree branch of a wide-trunked oak. He winked at her as he turned. “Let’s see,” he began as they got close to walk back together, giving her body a long up-and-down.

“Five,” she huffed, pretending to be offended. “I got you at least once.”

“Twice,” he said, lifting his arm to show her a lime green mark just below one armpit. “I didn’t even see it coming.”

“I probably didn’t aim it,” she laughed. This had been one of the best afternoons in recent memory.

At the car, the group assembled with tired exhilaration, casting critical looks at each other to try and speed up the count. There wasn’t a clear winner right away; each of them was painted rainbow. Nile noticed only that she was missing any of Booker’s vibrant orange on her. She tried to catch his eye to wrinkle her nose at his coddling, but he kept his gaze away from her. Joe and Nicky were laughing and pointing at each other, retelling the tales of each mark they had scored on the other.

“How’d everyone do?” Andy asked, beginning to take the guns to stow them back in the trunk. “Winner buys lunch.”

They lifted their arms and twirled slowly as if they were debutantes showing off their latest frock. Each of them had been hit a number of times, and the count was close.

“Great job, Andy,” Joe said, his head going back in an exaggeration of sportsmanship-like defeat. “You win again.”

“I win _always_ ,” she corrected, slipping her sunglasses back on as they finished taking off all the rest of the gear. She stood with one hand on her hip and one holding the trunk door aloft as they zipped up the last of the black duffle bags, and when Nicky stepped back, she slammed it closed with gusto.

“Can I drive?” Joe asked as they went around to the doors of the SUV.

“In your dreams.”

Joe sighed and took shotgun, leaving Nile to climb into the narrow middle backseat between Booker and Nicky.

“Can we make this an annual thing?” Nile asked as Andy turned the engine over.

“Maybe,” Andy hummed, her tamped-down amusement infectious. “It seems like I still have a few things to teach you young’uns.”

Nile grinned as the others gave a chorus of protesting groans. Personally, she couldn’t wait.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't ask when in the timeline this takes place. Like paintball, it exists in a liminal space of camaraderie and dye-filled gelatin capsules.
> 
> Said Tumblr post can be found here: https://gold-talisman.tumblr.com/post/638996427388878848/


End file.
